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Comment by Simon_ORourke | Hacker News Reader

Not being flippant about it, but my current requirements to pay the mortgage and support my wife and kids tend to push any sense of burnout down the priority list. I simply decide to keep plugging away, because if I stop to "find myself" things can get bad for lots of other people quickly.

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That's not how it works. If burnout is indeed looming over you, it does not care how far down you push it on your lists. It will get you. And then you and your dependents are proper fucked.

The only thing to do is to meet it on your own timeline, not its.

How do you personally define “burnout”?

Sounds like a bad time if the burnout actually comes in full force and you have dependents + mortgage. All the more reason to actually research what burnout is and how to avoid it if you ask me.

What you wrote is like saying "well, I'll just work through the pain" when someone asks about avoiding heart attack. That's not how heart attacks work, and that's not how burnout works either.

All due respect, this isn't burn out. This is boredom or being uninspired. It can be a drudge, uninteresting, and procrastinated, but actual burnout is a very different beast.

I have mortgage, wife, kids also and continue to plug along, but know the difference.

I had that, for years. That's not too say that I hated my job and was suffering. But it was stressful and I had collected to many unpaid extra responsibilities over years in a startup. But my number one goal was paying off my mortgage, becoming debt free and saving a nest egg, so I didn't really think about whether or not I really loved my job.

I got to my goal through a combination of good luck, hard work and other life choices (eg we have no kids, no car and are frugal for co² emission reduction). I also predicted the house prices crash of 2008 (not the whole thing, but definitely within my country) and waited for years while my friends bought vault overpriced properties way out of town. Then I watched the house prices tumble to decades low prices before grabbing an absolute bargain. That was one part of the luck. The other was the startup being acquired, but I got fucked on the stock, so it only just about covered my remaining debt. So I kept working and building a nest egg.

I did switch companies after a while and I spend another 2 years helping to build another startup. But one stressful day in the middle of a fundamental disagreement with my CTO, I just blurted out "I'm sorry, but think I quit!" I talked it through over the weekend with my wife, and confirmed it on the Monday.

After 20 years of unbroken employment I took 6 months off. I had all these plans for what I'd do (mostly tech side projects that I didn't have time for) but only achieved 10% of it because I was having so much fun doing DIY, gardening, running...

Up to that point in my life I was soooo tech focused. But after realizing that I could "insta-quit" at any time and do zero tech, I did worry that I had broken myself. But strangely enough I found myself working with another startup and absolutely loving it.

I realized that I need other people to need my expertise. Even though I love what I do, I find that I can't do it simply for myself. Work is a necessary "evil" that allows me to have my tech hobby. I just approach it differently now. I'm careful about who I work with and what they're building. Oh, and I also work 3.5 days a week now, so no more burnout.

What makes you able to work less than the standard week? Thanks for sharing by the way.

Frugal + no kids + good pay.

That let me pay my mortgage early, which became a multiplier on my ability to save and invest. At this point, 3.5 days per week pays me enough to live comfortably on. When I was negotiating my last offer I asked for shorter working hours instead of more money. They accepted.

This is like saying you won't change the oil, because the car is important to you. On the plus side, whatever burnout you're experiencing hasn't yet reached the later stages where one's functioning is super degraded or just halts. And, to be honest it sounds like it's not yet affecting your family life either, or you're not aware of it yet. Good place to be. An especially good place to look at prevention too. Recovery from advanced stages of burnout takes years. And if an episode catches you unawares (meaning you don't yet have a habit of recovering while functioning from a severe episode) it can bulldoze you for months. Do you have a financial buffer for that?

You can do this for a while, but sometime later, that tiny ember could turn into an inferno.

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